In this video and podcast, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, CPA, discuss the 50th anniversary of Microsoft, and the impact the PC has had on the profession, business, and society as a whole. Watch the video, listen to the audio podcast below, or read the transcript.
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Transcript
(Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors.)
SPEAKERS: Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA, Randy Johnston
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 00:00
Randy, welcome to the accounting Technology Lab, sponsored by CPA practice advisor. With your host, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, welcome
Randy Johnston 00:11
to the accounting Technology Lab. I’m Randy Johnston with my co host, Brian Tankersley, we’ve got a fun topic for you today. We’re going to take a look back. And we don’t often wax poetic nowadays, but it is Microsoft’s 50th anniversary that was actually officially on Friday, April 4 of 2025 was the 50th anniversary, and we thought it would be informative, frankly, to just take a moment and look back at what’s happened with Microsoft so as you think about the company, obviously, many of you use them for your productivity suite with Microsoft Office, and you have your operating system of Windows, and even if you’re a Mac user, you’re probably using Microsoft Office as well, besides many of the other tools that they have. But, you know, it has been a very interesting ride. Microsoft’s only had three CEOs this entire time, and they were together on that Friday the fourth but as we start thinking about, you know, the way this has evolved from a, you know, very humble tool development company, if you would. It is fascinating to, you know, reflect on this now Paul Allen, Bill Gates, you know, obviously Paul has passed away, and many of the founding fathers of computing are passing away at this point, or have retired out. But the vision of what could be done is pretty stunning in my mind. So, you know, I think that said I’m going to go to the way, way back machine with you for just a minute, and we’re going to bring Brian with me, so we’re going back in time. Yeah, and it turns out we’re entering the Twilight Zone for just a minute. Because, you know, it turns out I used the very first copies of DOS. I used some of the very earliest copies of Microsoft BASIC. I actually my first textbook that I wrote was basic using micros. So again, I was around the language stuff from the early on, and, of course, I was a language computer science specialist of the day, so all of the big things like basic and, you know, headline news lately, with COBOL, with the Social Security Administration and Lisp, because of AI, having wrote my first AI programs in Lisp 50 years ago. Again, I was an old, hardcore programmer, and I could write in any language of the day. So I hung with a lot of these techie people as they were developing this stuff, and had the good privilege of getting the first IBM PC in Kansas, which ran DOS and peach tree and BPM accounting software. At the time, it was really a fun thing to do. Well, it turns out, Mike no
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 03:08
BP, VPM accounting software, that’s the, that’s the group out of Pensacola. That was CPA as that was Mark Fenimore and everything.
Randy Johnston 03:15
No, I might, you might have misheard me, Brian, that was VPM, which was in Linux, but was out of Texas. And there were a number of companies out of Texas that ran some beautiful stuff, as it turns out, for accounting software. But many of those didn’t actually, you know, stay the course for a long time. Well, you know, when you look back to the, you know, 1981 release of the IBM PC, DOS was king, and it took a while for us to get to Windows two oh and three oh and actually, Windows one oh and so, it turns out windows one oh release, you Know, was still back in the dark ages, in the 80s, and it turns out that they were competing heavily against Apple with Lisa and other pieces at that point. But Windows one, oh, was really not that big of a deal, as much as it was for the IBM PS twos were in it, which were also announced on in April, April 2, 1987 and at that time, IBM was suggesting you could run OS two, which you could and the designs of the IBM PCs in those days, the model 5060, and 80 were brilliant, bloody boxes, as it turns out well, this micro channel architecture started to get people thinking that it would be a very interesting time to build much more sophisticated boxes. But let’s get the the you’re right for you when. Windows one came out in 1985 and I was teaching windows and the graphical user interface in that time frame, as we evolved from Windows one, oh to two, oh to three, oh and frankly, it wasn’t until Windows three one in 1992 and windows for work groups in 1993 that it really, really became a doable deal. So, you know, Brian has been, you know, scrolling a few things for you, but I would like to just maybe stop for a moment on the very crude looking Windows interface in Windows one, oh, okay, now that Windows one, oh, it was clear. It was character, and I was teaching this to students at great volumes and explaining the future will be this graphical user interface, even though it looks pretty ugly right now, I can see the benefits. So I’m happy to teach you DOS and automate a lot of things, but the fact the matter is, you better start getting used to this old Windows world. Well, the windows three, oh, interface. All of a sudden, things change in a big way. It was clear that the graphics quality of the Mac had made it across and of course, Apple and jobs and Microsoft and gates were, you know, kind of bitter enemies at that point in time. But it was also real playing that this environment was going to evolve relatively quickly. So with Windows three release in 1990 we could see the future was coming. Many of you were attending our courses at that point in time, and we were showing Windows three, oh, and then three one, which was getting close, and windows for work groups really made the difference. But you know, at this point, Brian, I think maybe if we think about Windows 95 together, there’s a bunch of tipping point dates that started happening in the 80s in the Microsoft world. So now I’m going to spin us back. We’re going to hold windows for just a minute here at 95 because that’s a big deal. And we’re going to go back to 1983 and in the 1983 time frame was when we got Microsoft Word. Now, at that point, most of you were, if you were in computing, at that time, you were using word star, you were using, you know, an early version of Word Perfect, and most of the competitive word processors were wildly better than Microsoft Word. There’s still, there’s still many features of Microsoft Word that are not as good as these. You know, other competitors. I’m actually going to pick on multimate for just a minute because it was a particularly powerful word processor that was used in legal and, you know, Word Perfect eventually, you know, became a major competitor there. But there are, I remember
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 08:11
financial statements being typed in in Word Perfect in the early 90s. And then I remember Coopers and Lybrand at the time, using we then had to learn this tool called em Pro that was Lotus word processor at the time when we on Windows 3.1 so it’s, you know, you’re going back to my to the very beginning of my career.
Randy Johnston 08:37
Understood, and in fact, as you were saying, that I was thinking about all the other competitors that you had to learn that were word processors, the smart word processing out of Kansas City. You know, the smart star was a beautiful deal. Word star, I can still do all the word star commands, as useless as that capability is, but this concept of having a word processor that could be graphical was a pretty big breakthrough, because there was character versions of most of these word processors as they tried to break over into this object oriented processing that we’re used to today. Well, you know, that was a pretty big breakthrough, as it turns out. But the next big breakthrough, of course, was this Windows release in 1985 and there was a convergence of major sorts in 1995 when Windows 95 was released and Internet Explorer was released. Now I won’t give you all the backstory today on Microsoft Office. I had the good pleasure of doing consulting work at Microsoft in that window as we evolved into the Word and Excel and PowerPoint suite, calling this thing office, okay, and I can give you a very interesting backstory sometime when we’re at a conference, including the way that we actually price the system. I can actually. Picture while I’m telling you today, sitting in my office, and it was at fifth and main here in Hutchinson, where I live. And you know, I put my feet up on the desk, which I don’t do very often, and I said, tell you what we’re going to do. And that’s exactly what Microsoft executed to try to win market share from Lotus, 123, and from Word Perfect and, you know, but the the whole internet thing also was breaking through now, I was fortunate enough to start on internet connections early in that in the 70s, and it became obvious that the internet was going to be a big deal. And Microsoft, of course, released Internet Explorer, so now we’ve got that, and we’ve got Windows 95 and we’ve got office 95 and our k2 organization had the pleasure of presenting for Microsoft in Australia and New Zealand is kind of evangelists of the platforms in those windows. So you can hear a little bit of fondness in this. But another major breakthrough that happened at the same time was Microsoft network was also launched. Now the Microsoft network was part of our design. It was the fundamental beginnings of what has become Microsoft 365 or office 365 and it was a competitor to AOL, but what we wanted to do was make internet access a lot more easy, and Microsoft could get to the Pops all over the world and get you that nice connection. Brian, I can’t do the modem sound, or I would for you, and we could have, you know, probably had that modem sound around for this, but you basically, most of the time dialed in, and Microsoft Network gave you the access without local charges, which was a big deal. What was your choice? AOL, CompuServe and so forth. But this, and
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 12:02
my, my family, actually did prodigy for a while, which was a was affiliated with, I think h and r block maybe. But ended up, it ended up also, there was also one called Genie that was run by GE, so it was a but it was a very big deal. I actually, back in the day, ran a, ran a bulletin board system back in the mid 80s, which was a pre, you know, which was a, you know, back when I was, I guess I was about a junior in high school when I did that, and it was, you know, you had a dedicated phone line to it, because getting on the internet was not something that you did. There were no ISPs that were anything other than dial up, other than the phone company. I mean, it was just a very different world. I thank God every day that we didn’t have camera phones and social media back when I was a teenager, so that the stupid things that I did as a teenager would not live on in perpetuity the way it does for the kids today. Completely
Randy Johnston 13:06
understood. And, you know, thinking about all this modem and that’s not the purpose of today’s call. I’m just thinking that, you know, when I got the first DSL actually ISDN. Sorry, let’s tell the story, right? Got the first ISDN in the state of Kansas, and then moved on and got the first DSL, and got the first cable line, and got the first satellite and got, you know, I’ve always tried to have the first of the mostest, just so we had the experience. But that’s a story for another day also. So again, at a conference, you pull me up and just say, turn on the old history machine, and I’ll, I’ll turn on the way back machine. But we’re at when at 95 so we’ve got this convergence of Microsoft network and Windows 95 and Internet Explorer and office 95 and all of a sudden you’ve got this kind of all inclusive environment. You know, you can throw a little accounting software at it, a few other things, you can make a real deal. So we
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 14:02
pivot tables came in around this, by the way. So pivot tables really are that old. Yeah,
Randy Johnston 14:07
as a matter of fact, we were doing the design work on Pivot Tables in 95 as when we started that design work, and they were released in service pack two of Office 97 and, you know. So they’ve evolved for, you know, 30 years in effect that way. But you know, now, rolling it forward, we had windows 95 and a lot of you used Windows 95 for a long time. But then after Windows 95 the windows 98 So Brian, if you can flip over to the Windows 95 view what you’ll find is, you know, it just kind of reminds you, you know, that was, that was pretty ugly, but you know what? At the time, extraordinary availability and access. And you’ll notice MSN is up there, set up the Microsoft network so, you know, that’s kind of the way it worked. Then micro. Soft kind of had an oops. You know, they, I won’t go into all the oopsies, but Windows 98 was a marginal upgrade. And you know, many of the other versions in here, Windows Vista and so where they were, kind of lost their way, but they found their way again with Windows 2000 which was really a special variant of the Windows Server operating system. And so they brought server reliability into the desktop with Windows 2000 now remember that when a Windows version was released like 95 there was often a release of office like 98 or 2000 or 2003 and of course, we switched from naming of years to letters for a while. But you know, the windows 2000 interface became pretty standard for a long time, still in use today. But the next successor behind that was Windows XP, which you know was kind of the 2001 time frame. So now you can tell we’re moving right along here. But there was another significant release in 2001 So Brian, if you flip back over a major release in 2001 was the Xbox. So we had the privilege of working at Microsoft to help build the Xbox. And of course, I was very interested in the superb graphic processing capability and the ability to run Linux on the console and so forth. And of course, Microsoft was trying to offset the Playstations and and the, I want to say, Game Boys.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 16:45
Now the Xbox v1 was like a p3 Pentium three, 700 megahertz, something like that, and you had like 64k of RAM, or was it 64 megs of RAM. It was not 64 megs of RAM and and hard drives back then were denominated in single digit gigs. Right
Randy Johnston 17:07
now, they were still pretty much like that. But the main thing was, was a risk power box. And so, you know, I was very much watching what was happening over at Sun with the spark workstations, and, you know, very much into high end CAD and all those things. But I wanted a computer that could maybe control the whole home, and the Xbox had a chance of doing that. Eventually, Microsoft came up with a Windows Home Edition PC. But, you know, as we went from XP into now, the failed Vista, if you would. That really got us to the Windows seven release, which was 2009 and in that same time frame, we also got to see another major release from Microsoft, because with Windows seven came the search engine of Bing. Now, Bing, there’s rumors. Came from Groundhog Day, you know, Bing, right? But as it turns out, that may not be true, but it wasn’t a very good search engine early on. It’s a pretty good search engine today.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 18:19
So so again, to get back to accounting here for a minute, I remember in the 2000 time frame when the Windows versions of softwares were starting to come out. And I distinctly remember Larry lesert saying that that there would always be a DOS version of the LA cert tax software. And so it’s a we’ve come a very, very long way. We have.
Randy Johnston 18:47
In fact, I remember helping a lot of these developers convert from dos to Windows, and many of them saying, people won’t really use Windows, they’ll, they’ll only use dos. And it’s like, yeah, I don’t think you’re right on that, but you know,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 19:03
peach tree really was crushing QuickBooks until Windows came out. Books for quick the DOS, the old versions of QuickBooks were not adopted well, and the peach tree for DOS was the, you know that in Great Plains, were the two tools that the accountants used at the time. That you really didn’t see QuickBooks very much at all.
Randy Johnston 19:24
Yeah, you know that is absolutely right. So you know, when you think about these evolutions at various points in time, you realize there was a major breakthrough. And speaking of major breakthroughs that we should have put in the right time frame, my omission Brian was this is Microsoft excels 40th birthday. Another reason why this nostalgic look back is important, because that was released on september 30 of 1985 so when I was talking about word being released in 83 excel in 85 Five, those are all kind of big deals. But see, we’re now talking about search engines with Bing, and now we get a new generation of browser in the 2015
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 20:11
window. And I remember going back to that. I remember my CFO at the time in like 1995 having me switch from Lotus to Excel because of pivot tables sometime in that time frame. And, and I, I distinctly remember, because he was a former Anderson guy, and, and it was, it was heresy to use something besides lotus, 123, at that time. Yeah,
Randy Johnston 20:41
it really was. So you know, reverting back and again, my timeline for you is not perfect, but I’m really trying to help you just get a flavor. See, Windows eight was a major breakthrough, but Microsoft had already kind of missed the mobile thing with Apple and the iPhone, and when Windows eight came out on August, 1 of 2012 2012 you know, that was a pretty significant breakthrough in the operating system game again, but the next major breakthrough came with the Windows 10 release. And you know, that was really where many of us are at today, with the one caveat and the key piece of learning for today, Windows 10 was released on July 29 of 2015 its end of life is october 14 of 2025. A 10 year window. And there are going to be three years of extended service that you can put on Windows 10, and a lot of you’re going to hold on to it because you don’t have the hardware to run Windows 11, and you’re most likely going to have to buy new hardware to replace it. And we’ll see how hardware pricing and availability continues. But this then evolution from Windows 10 to Windows 11 was the next major change in terms of operating systems, and it was really about Office 2010 office 2013 that the whole office 365 and Microsoft 365 initiatives happened we we see Office 2016 and office 2019 but it was clear that Microsoft wanted and needed the recurring revenue. So when Windows 11 was released on October 5 of 2021, at that point, they were really trying to drive a dominant office. 365 Microsoft, 365 purchase, strategy. Now we figured the future of Microsoft will be some sort of a Windows operating system. It might be called Windows 12. It might be called something else. It is clear that this year we’re talking about copilot, plus the AI powered PCs and a lot of that type of of traffic. But even though we’ve seen more SAS based products and more cloud adoption is also become clear to us that the CO processing that’s done by the PCs and the phones at the edge for AI is a pretty big deal. So while many say just don’t worry about it. Just use, you know, thin clients and dumb PCs and chrome based PCs, and just access everything in the cloud. You can do that, but you’re going to give up some of your AI capabilities, because AI can be run centralized on on a SaaS Azure AWS type of environment. In fact, I am now showing the four major companies providing AI based cloud computing in our Tech Update presentation. And Azure, by the way, is not one of them, just for the record, and when you get to this cooperative processing next, working on desktops and laptops is your next AI place, and working on your smartphones is the third place. And you’re going to see that. I think this will continue more and more as we get further and further out to the edge. I do have a bit of a concern that, you know, internet speeds will stay up with the consumption that we need, but very smart people are in that So Brian, I knew we missed a lot of things in this window, just chit chatting about this, and I know I didn’t let you talk much, but you know, bottom line here, we’ve evolved with Microsoft from a tool development company programming languages, if you will, to operating systems with DOS and many versions of Windows and many versions of Office and innovations in Internet access to really provide a standard platform for developers to work on. On and what you may not be able to appreciate is almost every tool that you have in use today, on your Mac, your Linux boxes or your PCs, is possible because of Microsoft tool sets at heart, Microsoft is a developer’s company that now just happens have a lot of revenue from productivity tools like Windows and Office and Azure, SQL, things like that, and again, lots of other products in their line, and lots of acquisitions that made it possible. So Brian, closing thoughts or parting thoughts for our listeners and viewers today,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 25:39
gosh, well, it’s just, it’s, it’s, we are such a long way from the first computer I ever had, which was an apple two plus that had, I think, a scalding 64k of RAM and a heart and a didn’t have a hard drive, but it had a two floppy drives. They held 143k each per disc. And so it was a, it’s an interesting time, you know, the as we look at, as we look at all this stuff, you know, remember, what? What many of you may not remember, you know, as we sit here with people talking about AI replacing accounting right now, I think it’s important for everybody to remember that piece that we’ve had so many things that we’re going to replace accounting over the years, computers were going to replace accounting when I was in college in the in the late 80s, early 90s. Then I was going to lose my job to a PC. Then I was going to lose my job to, what’s the next thing? ERP, then I was going to lose my job to to, you know, the cloud, and then it was outsourcing. And, you know, the only thing I can think of that’s that’s really a constant over my 33 years in the accounting profession now is that there’s always something that somebody says is going to end accounting, okay? And it hasn’t ended yet. And I don’t see it happening anytime soon, because as soon as you take the humans out of it, it’s, you know, you the fraud is going to tick up, and then you have to throw the humans back in to get rid of it. So it’s a it’s a fabulous time to be in the profession, and Microsoft has been with us a long time. And even though many of you are switching over to cloud hosting and things like that, I want you to notice that the cloud applications have not quite caught up with the desktop applications. Here’s what I mean you can do. Certainly there are options for cloud based tax software, and primarily tax software is the one I’m thinking about. Payrolls largely gone to the cloud. But for tax, you really, the only really cloud hosted things you still have Are you have the option of doing intuits, proline, Pro Connect, tax online. And then you have, you have cch is access which does require an installed client.
Speaker 1 28:00
And then you have and then you have Thompson’s
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 28:05
go system. But that’s it. And so it’s a very, very long, it’s very, very long way I remember my CD server that I had, that I had to maintain, to have all the CDs from all the research providers, and how I had to, had to swap the discs out and everything else. And so it’s a it’s been an interesting ride to be sure, very excited that very excited to be where we are today, and I can’t wait to see what comes in the future. Well,
Randy Johnston 28:33
I appreciate that now you even gave me more hold of home week nostalgia. My My earliest machine, not the first, but my one of my early machines was a moral micro decision, a CPA based machine that we were so lucky to have words star on. That’s how I wrote my first books. I still have my Moro micro decision machine, and it still works, which is pretty fascinating. I think I can still run it, but
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 29:02
I remember, I remember when I was at UC Davis. I went to UC Davis in the fall of 87 and I had a friend that was at another university. And so I I went through and got set up so that I could send email to him. And it was Internet email, and it was like early early days. I had to fill out a form to get an email account, and it was a big deal at the time. So it’s a amazing how much things have changed in the years.
Randy Johnston 29:33
It is well, I hope you enjoyed our little bit of walk back and look back at Microsoft, other companies probably deserve similar overview and accolades, but there’s not a lot of technology companies that are 50 years old, and I’m betting you’re using many of Microsoft’s tools. We will speak to you very good very soon again, and we appreciate you. Listening in when we talk to you again on another accounting Technology Lab. All the best here. Good day.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 30:09 Thank you for sharing your time with us. We’ll be back next Saturday with a new episode of the technology lab from CPA practice advisor. Have a great week.
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